Saturday, July 25, 2015

In Conversation: GMB Chomichuk

GMB Chomichuk
is a writer and illustrator, when not teaching art at St. James
Collegiate and parenting his two boys. His work has appeared in film,
TV, and books, comics and graphic novels. His slogan is: "Join the fight.
Make comics!"

Chomichuk took time away from researching Golden Age superheroes to answer questions about genre, making art and ego.

FP: Tell me about the pleasures of speculative fiction. What can you
do in spec-fic that you can't do in regular fiction?

GMB Chomichuk:
Well, I can write a time-travel noir story despite genre conventions
and never look back. I can ask questions that are strange and give
answers that are stranger still. I can do what I want. It's there in the
title of the genre: I can speculate without limits.

FP:
Infinitum is described as "time travel noir." How does it conform to
conventions of film noir, i.e. Hollywood crime dramas of the '40s and
'50s, and where does it modernize things a bit?

GMBC: For
Infinitum, I had to make a choice. A choice about noir. The conventions
of film noir were fabulous for comics: non-linear, stark imagery (and)
convoluted plots that hinge on the bizarre. I had to make a choice,
though. In most film noir, the woman is always the victim or the plot
device. Women have almost no agency in film noir. That part I threw
away. My hero and victim change positions a few times in the story. I
changed the trope of the gritty narrator, made it into more of a
Socratic dialogue. I left moments in the story that require you (to)
flip back (to time travel within the book itself) to clarify. I didn't
try to modernize anything, I just tried to make something that matched
my current view of the world through the metaphor of comics.

FP: In
your books, sometimes you're the writer, sometimes you're the artist,
and sometimes you're both. Do you ever get your words confused with your
images?

GMBC: Sometimes.
But when that happens, I go with it. If an image carries me past the
words, I try to leave them out. Usually I'm at work on multiple things,
but I try to take on projects that are different in tone and scope so
that working on one will give new perspective on another.

FP:
You're a high school art, drama and English teacher when not making
comics. Tell me how your two vocations are different and how they're the
same.

GMBC: The jobs
serve very different parts of myself. Lots of people think my role as a
teacher is some sort of stopgap or 'have to' job. I could do full-time
writing and illustrations, but then part of me would be missing.
Teaching isn't about ego; you have to check ego and take on everyone
else's needs. Creating stories is predicated on ego, the notion that you
have something to say that others should listen to. I am better
balanced because of those two daily vocations. No matter what the future
holds for me, I hope there are classrooms.

FP:
Your mother was dying as you were writing Infinitum. The book is many
things: a doomed romance, a mystery, but also a wistful but loving
meditation on memory. Tell me about your mom's influence on your
thinking, on your work ethic, on your writing.

GMBC: My mother,
Claudia, was the first person in my life to push the idea of publishing
my fiction. She was a voracious reader and set that as an example. I
wrote all the time and she would always ask quietly, with the leverage
of a mother's tone, "When are you going to write a novel?" She always
showed pride in my graphic-novel work but she'd ask about that novel.
I've written several, but none that is ready. She was a teacher and a
glass artist, but not at the same time. Standing in her studio now,
surrounded by so many unfinished, fragile, beautiful things, I am
determined to leave nothing out, nothing for later. To fill the hours of
my life with more creation than consumption.

FP: What are you reading right now?

GMBC: Hundreds of Golden Age comics and all of H.P. Lovecraft as research, Howl's Moving Castle and The Peripheral for enjoyment.

FP: What are you writing right now?

GMBC: Not much. I
just sent in a comics pitch. A project for the Make-A-Wish foundation,
two kids' books, and a fighting monster comic, all created with Justin
Currie. A film script and a cartoon pilot, plus a few other things. I
just had the most wonderful creative meeting that may combine my
teaching drive and my narrative drive into one project intended for
students. At this exact moment, I'm doing the finishing touches on the
art for Renegade Arts Entertainment's Underworld, written by Lovern
Kindzierski (a surrealist monster-soaked mythological retelling of The
Odyssey through the lens of 1980s Winnipeg) and writing dialogue for
ChiGraphic's Midnight City (a nightmare fuel horror graphic novel set in
the Golden Age of superheroes). And of course, a novel. It sounds like a
lot, I know. But it's just one word at a time.

No comments:

me me me

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways, won the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Stowaways

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with itsoccasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Hump

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)